Yogi: How do we work with mental suffering – like the mind latching onto thoughts and how to work with that?

Sayadaw: The practice of meditation is a discipline – it’s training the mind so that we don’t have to suffer the things that the mind willfully wants to do like causing us to think again and again about something that we really don’t want to suffer from. But if we don’t train the mind, we don’t have the option to stop that suffering.

When we train the mind, that option becomes available to us because now the mind knows how to pay attention to an object, how to place the mind here or there, how to observe a feeling and not get lost in the thinking, or how to have right attitude. All those help to deal with hurtful thoughts.

Each of the exercises that we do will help to deal with that.